Material Culture: Still ‘Terra Incognita’ for Psychology Today?

Europe's Journal of Psychology, 2015, Vol. 11(2), 172–176, doi:10.5964/ejop.v11i2.995 Published (VoR): 2015-05-29. *Corresponding author at: Institute of Psychology, Lausanne University, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. E-mail: Christiane.Moro@unil.ch This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


Inaugurated by
seminal research, this conceptualisation of the object refers to it as 'what is placed in front of', 'which exists independently from the mind' (from the Latin objectum). It conceives objects in terms of their physical properties, as a result of an attribution by the solitary subject. This view is grounded in the classical subjectivity orientation within philosophy, inspired by Descartes and Kant, in which the world is theoretically defined as an objective entity. From that time onwards, the object has been limited to the rational and consequently, its historical, cultural and semiotic features have been overlooked or naturalised. To come back to the example of early development, besides Piaget, this is also the case for subsequent inneist, computationalist and social cognition perspectives (e.g., Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985;Leslie, 1987, inspired by Fodor;and Tomasello, 1999, inspired by Gibson).
The same surprising absence applies, but for different reasons, to the cultural-historical developmental tradition which has some difficulties in placing the issue of material culture on its agenda. Why such a lack of consideration of the cultural status of the object in the cultural-historical framework? Representing this tradition, Vygotsky (1962;Vygotsky & Luria, 1994) attributes a considerable role to language, considered as the semiotic system par excellence in human development. We assume that this pre-eminence of language is the consequence of a focus on social relations grounded in the legacy of Marx's anthropology (cf. The 6th Thesis on Feuerbach) where it is asserted that the humanitas de l'homo, i.e., "[…] the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.
In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations" (Marx, 1845 [my emphasis]). If we do agree with this conception of external human essence as expressed by Marx, we consider that the identification of the culture to the social in Vygotsky's framework leads to neglecting the intrinsic meaning of the object as related to its conventional use in favour of an extrinsic meaning, over-determined by the linguistic device.
As a consequence, in the above positions, the object is invisible and the role of material culture for human development is under-theorised. The aim of making visible material culture in psychology brings us close to the field of Material Culture Studies (e.g. Hicks & Beaudry, 2010;Tilley, Keane, Küchler, Rowlands, & Spyer, 2006) in which materiality is a growing research topic emerging at the frontier between archaeology and anthropology.
This new, interdisciplinary field, unbounded and unconstrained, reconsiders material culture as "an integral dimension of culture, and that there are dimensions for social existence that cannot be fully understood without it" (Tilley et al., 2006, p. 1). The domain of things or objects is the principal concern but, alternatively, material culture studies can also take the human subject or the social as their starting point (Tilley et al., 2006). This field of research is animated by substantive debates and, amongst them, the utility of creating a separate category of the 'material' that is not materially enacted (Hicks, 2010, referring to Ingold, 2007. This question is intrinsically linked to the definition of material culture and material objects, even if some scholars refuse to consider it (see Miller, 2010).
In psychology, an increasing stream of interdisciplinary work dealing with objects, things, artefacts, etc., reflecting various orientations of research and using different conceptual and theoretical frameworks one can identify. These works broadly originate in cultural-historical perspectives without excluding the interconnection with other psychological traditions such as (without being exhaustive) cognitive perspectives, biological theory, neurosciences, etc., and making use of semiotic, phenomenological, ecological or anthropological approaches. These studies are trying to reflect on what was a taken-for-granted issue, insisting on the significance and importance of investigating material domains to understand human development (e.g., Andrén, 2010;de La Ville & Tartas, 2010;Glăveanu, 2014;Moro, 2011;Moro & Muller Mirza, 2014;Moro & Rodríguez, 2005;Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2008;Rickenmann, 2014;Sinha, 2005) with topics concerning, for example, early development, creativity, the work of art, consumption, education, professional practices, gestures, among others. In this strive to reintroduce materiality in psychology and to explore its cultural, historical and semiotic status in human development, it is interesting to turn, once again, to philosophy. In particular towards phenomenology and to Heidegger who challenged the Kantian doxa by reintroducing a reflection on things and objects in the ordinary world. His perspective is filling, in a certain way, the gap left opened in cultural-historical theory (cf. Vygotsky) concerning the material world. We choose to address this approach, in the end, as it is an illustration of the perspective of ordinariness also evoked by Schütz and Luckmann (1973) and Searle (1995) and because that it might constitute a new and fruitful perspective for psychology (cf. also Wittgenstein, 1961 andCavell, 1986).
Challenging the Kantian doxa by rethinking the world and things in their ordinariness -within which, since the beginning, human relationships are embedded -the conception of phenomenology sheds new light on the issue of 'Wordliness' of the world through, inter alia, a reflection on the 'Thing'. In Being and Time, Heidegger (1996) goes beyond Kant's classical subjectivity by exploring the Wordliness of the world in order to understand what it means to be a world for the Dasein. Etymologically, Dasein (German neologism) means 'Being-there' and is usually translated by 'Being-in-the-world'. What is interesting for the question of materiality is that the world is reintroduced in its ordinariness and is considered as a significant whole in relation to the Dasein. The world in which one dwells may be accessed through activities, by how one engages with things in the world in a pragmatic mode.

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Competing Interests
The author has declared that no competing interests exist.